What am I looking for anyway?

A little background. I had a general life melt-down about 12 years ago, with a central focus on my apparent ineptitude in some areas of relationships with women, principally my wife at the time. True, things getting extreme was "aided" by a misplaced confidence in modern medicine and heavy doses of the latest "wonder drug" but having an attitude that I used to think was optimism (but now seems more like just wishful thinking) contributed heavily. In any case, it was about five years before I entertained the thought of risking the emotional pain of things not working out in another relationship and, worse, the potential for being a source of emotional pain for others, regardless of my good intentions.
Being in hotels, on business trips, rarely brought the expected distraction of being excited about being in a new and different setting; instead, it mostly left me focusing on how alone I was and what I was looking for in the next relationship. Fortunately for me, at one point a few years ago, I was staying in a rather upscale hotel and it led me to an insight about whether I was limiting my options by expecting to find everything I was looking for in a relationship in an actual human being. Opening the closet door, I reached for the valet service laundry bag and started a new relationship just like that. It was a very attractive bag, slick white (actually quite a bit too pale for my usual taste), hanging upside down and even appearing as if wearing inversion boots--quite edgy. It just hung there not seeming self-conscious at all about what it was doing. I took it out and draped it over the back of a chair. It didn't say anything but, disappointed as I was with that since I'm a very verbal person, I just went with the flow and figured I could do all the talking (it is a laundry bag, after all).
I noticed that it was communicating by way of an attached checklist that was fluttering in the air conditioner breeze. Perfect! It's telling me what it wants or, at least, what my options are, in plain language, in writing, and with me being able to keep a copy for later, apparently so we could compare notes if there was a disagreement/misunderstanding, so neither of us would be reduced to having to remember and have that be a big deal and a source of contention. It had a tattoo--the hotel logo--but I found myself being less judgmental about that compared to my attitude towards tattoos in isolation from what they are attached to. We ended up spending some time together, mostly just going about our business, although sometimes watching television together, with it just staying there draped over the chair, but finally I noticed that, just like that, I was starting to fall for this bag! Ultimately my bubble burst when I noticed that there were PRICES next to that checklist!  I immediately felt queasy--I was getting involved with a WORKING bag. Later, it occurred to me that, what the hell, I do things for money too; I guess we all just do the best we can with what we've got. I did bring the bag home with me but I knew this relationship was over. That's where Nancy came in.
As always, I keep my best friend, Nancy, up to date on my love life, or lack thereof. I talked to her about the prostitute bag and how it had opened my eyes to new possibilities. She suggested that I should still consider relationships with women to supplement any relationship I might have with a plastic bag but was happy for me nonetheless. Unbelievably (okay, not really because she comes up with this kind of stuff all the time), a few days later a package arrives in the mail from her. She'd found and sent me a very attractive cloth bag, much more my speed in overall appearance and demeanor, and with NO price list attached! It doesn't talk either but what an amazing bag! This could work out. Here are the captioned photos:




It's a magic bag! When I got
home, I found it had arranged
itself like a chef's hat on the
TV. We had a good laugh over it.




We communicated more and I've
learned that "it" is a
female and she has excellent
keyboarding skills as well as IT savvy.




"Baggy" is very domestic.
Here she's cooking my dinner.
What a great bag!
 




What's that noise so early in
the morning? It's Baggy
vacuuming! This is really turning
out well.






Baggy does have a troubled side; in
fact we share the fork biting
phobia. Here, I found her in the
kitchen, just in time.

 


 Baggy can't get enough of
bicycling even when it's just
hanging on the wall. I think
I'm falling in love.

essential info about my backpack or a bad picture of biting a fork?

Answer: Both. I sent this picture, originally, as a bad substitute for not having a picture of biting a fork--sometimes I have the caption before I have the photo. However, I get lots of questions about my backpack. One brother calls it my "Millennium Backpack". I admit that, in many ways, I'm just an aging boy scout and still adhere to the motto "be prepared". I've decided to do an inventory, both to remind myself of what the hell I'm carrying around all the time and, likely, make some changes and to have a basis for a "what's in my backpack?" contest. To answer a recent question and give you an early start on imagining what might be in there, it weighed 25 pounds when I weighed it a week ago on Friday (and that's without my laptop and charger, which adds another 7 pounds).

photos with captions: an inadvertent hobby

For a long time I resisted getting a PDA because I usually had my laptop computer with me and I didn't want to carry yet another special purpose device. What made the difference for me was when they came out with the combination PDA and cell phone with wireless Internet access. As a very secondary consideration, I thought it would be interesting to have that gadget include a digital camera as well--relatively low resolution notwithstanding, it seemed like having some camera with me all the time vs no camera most of the time might pay off. I even decided to take advantage of the one month free trial service that allowed me to send pictures with captions to people wirelessly. Within a very short period, I realized I'd stumbled upon a new and favorite hobby.

I've sent over 400 pictures with captions, so far, and found that what made it fun and interesting for me was the immediacy of it and the challenge (for me), usually trying to be funny, to work within the original limit of 125 characters for the caption. Having been overly shy about sharing my creative work, my audience for these captioned photos was almost entirely limited to my friend Nancy, who shares my sense of humor. Being a little slow sometimes, it took awhile before I realized that if only 1% of people have my sense of humor, that' 3 million people, just in the United States.

So, for the sake of bringing a few smiles on occasion AND having a large stockpile of things I can post quickly when I have nothing "new" to offer, I'll be posting some of them here, working through them from the oldest first, starting with my next post. Also, I've taken many photos for which I never did come up with a caption, which is sad, so I'll be posting photos those and challenging you to come up with one where I haven't.

Well???

I've caught myself being disappointed with checking my blog and finding I haven't posted anything new lately, so I know how you must feel. I'd started spending time looking into some of the nifty things you can do with a blog, like adding a visit counter and getting other basic statistics on activity. I just STOPPED doing that in favor of posting this; it actually makes sense to have something worth keeping statistics on before you start keeping them. As I was discussing with my friend Nancy, yesterday, imagine if the founder of Google had been stopped by paying attention to how he spelled the name of his company instead of focusing on the service it would provide. It's actually a mistake; he intended to use the word googol (which means 10 to the 100th power, a LARGE number) but who cares now?

I am still interested in pushing the envelope of what would be interesting in this blog, for me and others, and I'll find a balance between unrealized intentions and actual content. Maybe I'll just post links to other interesting things when I'm not taking the time to create anything myself--sort of like blogger Muzak while you are waiting ;-)

For now, since everyone has fond memories of geography quizzes, study this map and we'll have a quiz later.

favorite movies

In case you didn't notice (and it seems likely since I didn't notice any flag that my profile was updated), I've added my list of favorite movies to my profile. Lest some of you think I have obsessive/compulsive tendencies (although, for the record, I have obsessive/compulsive tendencies), I didn't create the list from scratch. I just grabbed my Netflix 5 star rated list and, even though there are 62 in the list, posted the whole thing instead of editing down to something less on some basis (like, let's see, favorite movies I like more than my other favorite movies).

(NOTE: This post is in no way intended as a trick to get more people to view my profile and make me seem more popular. However, if that consideration is enough to stop you AND you are, nonetheless, just dying to know what my 62 favorite movies are, let me or someone else know and we'll find another way to get the list to you.)

adventures in the culinary arts

I admit that most of my efforts in food preparation are fairly basic but it's not like I'm stuck there. For example, it occurred to me that instead of unceremoniously dumping my hot, cooked, multi-grain breakfast mush into a bowl I could dump it unceremoniously onto a PLATE, like so:



Then I noticed that, although it tasted great, it didn't look all that appealing due to it landing mostly flat side up. So the next time, voila, dumped on a plate, mostly flat side down PLUS drizzled with honey, like so:



Then, thinking there was nowhere else to go in the breakfast mush arena, I realized I'd been overlooking a fringe benefit of not rinsing out the cooking pot promptly--dry, translucent, mush goo flakes! Clearly these will make either a dandy garnish or an extremely light separate snack.

Okay, I've just added a picture to my profile but, immediately, that reminds me that one of my pet peeves is people adding "authority" to what someone says based upon sometimes very superficial impressions of them. I'd rather have whatever I have to say evaluated on the merits so, on the outside chance that my profile photo lends credibility, inappropriately, here's a less staged photo, from early one morning or late one night (I can't remember) when I'm in my confused and or skeptical mode (I don't remember which).

And so it begins...

Well, I'm off to my usual start but I declare this first post as a victory over my procrastinating past!

I recently promised some friends that I would set aside all of my considerations about doing a blog and just do it--just because I can. I got my primary inspiration to do this from my sister, who proposed it over a year ago, and my friend Nancy, who started her blog about 8 or 9 months ago. I've challenged myself to be as openly self-expressed as Nancy has been and not devolve into my usual "analysis paralysis" and stifling perfectionism that has kept me on the sidelines for much too long.

To give you an idea of how things typically go for me, here's how it went to get to this point:

1) coming from a commitment to being generous, I decide that blogging is the answer to my getting familiar with sharing whatever I have to share much more publicly;

2) promise my friends that, within 3 months (yes, that's right THREE MONTHS!), I'll have started blogging;

3) create a list of prerequisites to getting started (some reasonable, like researching sites, tools, and features; some not so reasonable, like finishing certain projects and chores first and, of course, staying overly involved with my job, even on my days off);

4) with just a week to go before my self-imposed deadline and being committed to honoring my word, I finally dive into getting things done;

5) last night, having indulged myself with two final distractions (creating yet another email account and setting up my Treo to synch with it), I stub out my blog page and get oh so close to that first post;

6) at 3 AM this morning, can't decide between a "first post title" of "And so it begins..." (the winner) and "Hello world!" (which comes from my computer programming experience);

7) about an hour ago, it's bothering me that I don't recall where the phrase/quote "and so it begins" comes from and I decide that maybe it's lame to start off my "self-expression" project by just repeating something that someone else said, so I'm off Googling for references to it; and

8) I realize that I'm still just stalling AND it's inconsequential AND between the two titles I've thought of "Hello world!" is as bad as it gets AND someone else (Living Photoshop blog) used the exact title to start his blog BUT it looks good--so I'm stealing it!

So here it is! Step one complete. Now I'll be getting on with making your future visits worthwhile.

Hmmm, about that posting a picture issue ...